Beginnings

My father had a Voightlander folding camera. I liked to play with it, opening it, pulling the lens and bellows out. As much I tried I could never learn to use it. I remember taking the camera and tripod on a class trip to the Museum on 81st Street and Central Park West in New York. Arranging the camera outfit in front of the dioramas of wild animals hunted and killed by Theodore Roosevelt and stuffed to look completely natural, in their natural settings (I thought that was the reason it was named The Natural History Museum), I shot one roll of 620 film and dropped it off at the drugstore on Featherbed Lane, not far from my family’s apartment on Davidson Avenue in the Bronx. I can still sense the anticipation when retrieving the processed roll only to find out that little, if anything, “came out”. I mention this because when I announced, years later, that I had chosen to become a professional magazine photographer my family cracked up laughing.

You see, I already had a history of trying my damnedest to make something, or build something, that usually failed -- humiliatingly so, because my dad was the greatest fixer/maker of all time -- and I truly mean that -- he was a cabinetmaker who measured each piece of wood three times before cutting it. His joints fit perfectly. His edges were smooth. His nail holes were filled and sanded until they disappeared. He put the tiniest wood scraps to good use. And so, whenever I tried to build something he would arrive at my shoulder, watch for a moment or two, then tell me what I was doing wrong and within minutes, he’d take the tools out of my hands and begin remaking whatever it was I was attempting to assemble.

I would observe his incredible dexterity with a plane or chisel, a tack hammer, glue, clamps for a while but I would eventually grow bored and wander off searching for something else to do. Something, perhaps, that would give me a satisfying completion experience.

It was during this period of my struggles with trial and error that I had the good fortune of having two gifted photographers move in to the small building across the street from me.

I first noticed Simon Nathan lugging his “gadget bags” up the long flight of steps from the Mt. Eden elevated train station. Making his acquaintance I was soon baby-sitting for his, and his spouse, Ida Wyman’s children, David and Nancy. In return, not only was I paid a few quarters, but, I was given limited access to some of Simon’s amazing cameras. He instructed me, encouraged me, and within a short time, I was taking pictures with Nikons! And he developed them. And they came out!

After graduating from New York’s High School of Industrial Arts (now the School of Art and Design), I went off to Ohio University to study photography under the tutelage of Clarence White and Walt Allen. It was in the Photog building that I met my friend, Paul Fusco (Look, then Magnum Photos) who told me time and again “Don’t quit taking pictures, Chuck. You’ve got something to say.” And Bob McElroy (Newsweek) who, easily annoyed by my constant pestering questions about lenses and papers and film stock, chased me from the photo lab at O.U.. Thanks for being my friend and for shooting my wedding, 40 years ago, still among the greatest all time collection of wedding pictures.

Thrown in among a talented pool of photographers like college roommate, the late Vitas Valitis (BlackStar), graduating senior, Ben Martin (Time Magazine) and Fusco and McElroy, I learned how to see pictures, print them so that they could be “read”, how to choose subjects and most important of all, how to anticipate a photograph beginning to “form” and be ready to capture it in a moment of time.